An Xbox engineer has managed to restore a Pac-Man ghost emote that was made in 2006.
As reported by The Verge, earlier in the month, Gabriel Roland Tweeted about an emote that he'd managed to keep since 2006. That emote is a ghost in the power-pellet state from Pac-Man, although over the years it has shrunk down in size due to how avatars have changed over 15 years.
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Gabriel Roland said, "With each passing generation, Xbox tries to shame my Pac-Man ghost avatar by shrinking it ever smaller and smaller. I will not yield. I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006, and I'll be fucked if it won't remain the best dollar I've ever spent until the seas boil over".
This caught the attention of Xbox lead engineer Eden Marie, who said, "Oh no! Are you running in 4k? I'm going to make it my personal mission to make sure you can see this gamerpic again with absurdly huge pixels if it kills me".
Well, as it turns out, Marie has actually managed to get the 2006 avatar back up to a viewable state. She Tweeted, "It's a lot of fun, and sometimes, you even learn something new, like… apparently 360 gamerpics supported transparency all along? SURPRISE. Anyway, what do you think @noukon? Feel better about that dollar?"
The image that Eden Marie posted shows the same Pac-Man avatar, but it's now been brought into the modern era and looks like a normal Xbox avatar. Compared to how it looked when Gabriel posted it, it's a massive improvement.
Marie credits Microsoft's leniency in letting her and her team experiment with things during work, saying, "As an aside, on the Experiences team we have something called Exploration Time, which lets us use half a day each week on any random thing that tickles our fancy in the product! I love that we do it, and this week I absolutely chose to use it to rescue ghosts".
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